Automated club branded membership emails

Introduction

ManageMyMatch closely integrates with MailChimp to give you powerful member mail-out  capabilities. Refer to this article that describes how you can send out smart, engaging mail-outs to your membership. But you can also use MailChimps 'automation' features to send personalised, club branded emails whenever certain events happen for any particular member. For example, when a member buys a subscription. Here's how this works.

Choose the 'Automate' main menu option in your MailChimp account followed by 'Email' and then choose the 'Event API' option. There are several events that you can hook into from ManageMyMatch, namely (set one these as the 'event name' in MailChimp):

• assign_membership
• assign_tournament
• assign_standalone
• link_user
• unlink_user

'assign' event types

These are triggered when a user is in receipt of a 'product' in ManageMyMatch. Products can be one of three types:

1. membership - A membership subscription (only one can apply at any one time)
2. tournament - A buy-in to a tournament or programme
3. standalone - Purchase of something that would grant some kind of access to club's facilities with or without the need for a membership

When preparing the email, we recommend leveraging the rich set of MERGE tags that MailChimp provides. MailChimp provides a good cheat sheet of what is available. In addition, ManageMyMatch provides additional variables (called properties) that can be inserted into the email design. These are:

• name - the name of the product
• description - the longer description of the product
• start - when the product comes into effect
• end - when the product expires
• recipient - who has been assigned the product
• charge - a description of the fee charged, that will include details of any joining fee that applies and acknowledgment of monthly payments if chosen. Example: 85.00 GBP collected in 12 monthly instalments plus a joining fee of 15.00 GBP

These can be inserted into the text using special EVENT tags, for example *|EVENT:name|* will insert the name of the product purchased in the email text.

You should also consider using the ManageMyMatch built in merge tags. For example, for a subscription purchase you could use MailChimp's conditional clauses to indicate whether a purchased subscription was a renewal - if the PAST ("Recent member") merge tag is 'Yes' then this would indicate they have a membership that has recently expired or will expire in the next 2 months and so this new membership must be a renewal.

'link' and 'unlink' event types

Any user can link with the club. They would do so only if they intended to have some kind of business with the club, though this may not necessarily mean they should be members. For example, they might simply be considering the club for membership or they might have access to the club's courts for certain purposes. For what ever reason, when someone links with the club, this is the best opportunity for the club to reach out to them and start a conversation. So creating a personalised, club branded email for a link_user event would be an opportunity for the club to introduce itself with an automated email.

You may consider to delay this email by a day or so (in MailChimp you can set a delay on the trigger) so that you can be smart about the kind of message you give depending on whether the user had subsequently bought a subscription or not. For example, you could create two automated campaigns with this trigger; one filtering on ManageMyMatch's merge tag 'continued member' set to 'Yes' and the other set to 'No'. The former could review the club's facilities as a member and the latter could be more geared to encouraging the user to join.